These are agonizing times for America. This nation has been
torn apart by a war that has seared its conscience. We have
spent lives and wealth without limit in pursuit of an unworthy
goal, preserving our own power and prestige while laying waste
the unfortunate lands of Southeast Asia.

For twenty years this nation has been at war in Indochina.
Tens of thousands of Americans have been killed, half a million
have been wounded, a million Asians have died, and millions
more have been maimed or have become refugees in their own
land. Meanwhile, the greatest representative democracy the
world has even seen, the nation of Washington, Jefferson, and
Lincoln, has had its nose rubbed in the swamp by petty war
lords, jealous generals, black marketeers, and grand-scale
dope pushers.

And the war still goes on. People are still dying, arms and
legs are being severed, metal is crashing through human bodies,
as a direct result of policy deecisions conceived in secret
and still kept from the American people.

H. G. Wells, the English novelist and historian, once wrote:

The true strength of rulers and empires
lies not in armies or emotions, but in the belief of men
that they are inflexibly open and truthful and legal. As
soon as a government departs from that standard, it ceases
to be anything more than “the
gang in possession,” and its days are numbered.

This is nowhere more true than in the conduct of a representative
democracy. Free and informed public debate is the source of
our strength. Remove it and our democratic institutions become
a sham. Perceiving this, our forefathers included with our
Constitution a Bill of Rights guaranteeing the maximum competition
in the marketplace of ideas, and insuring the widest opportunity
for the active and full participation of an enlightened electorate.

The American people have never agreed that the performance
of their elected officials should be immune from public discussion
and review. They have never failed to support their government
and its policies, once they were convinced of the rightness
of those policies. But they should not be expected to offer
their support merely on the word of a President and his close
advisors. To adopt that position, as many do today, is to demonstrate
a basic mistrust in the collective wisdom of the people and
a frightening lack of confidence in our form of government.

Our nation was founded at the town meeting, where all citizens
had a voice in the decisions of government. Support for policies
was insured, for they were made by the people affected. But,
with the passage of time, the center of decisionmaking has
escaped the people, and has even moved beyond their representatives
in the Congress. With its array of specialists, its technology,
and its ability to define state secrets, the Executive has
assumed unprecedented power of national decision. The widespread
and uncontrolled abuse of secrecy has especially fostered distrust
and created division between the government and its people.

We now find policies on the most fundamental of issues, war
and peace, adopted without the support or understanding of
the people affected by them. As a result of these practices,
especially with respect to our involvement in Southeast Asia,
our youth has virtually abandoned hope in the ability of their
government to represent them, much less to stand for the ideals
for which the Republic once stood. The trust between leaders
and their people, without which a democracy cannot function,
has been dangerously eroded, and we all fear the result.

For it is the leaders who have been found
lacking, not the people. It is the leaders who have systematically
misled, misunderstood, and, most of all, ignored the people
in pursuit of a reckless foreign policy which the people
never sanctioned. Separated from the public by a wall of
secrecy and by their own desires for power, they failed to
heed the voice of the people, who saw instinctively that
America’s vital interests were
not involved in Southeast Asia. Nor could they bring themselves
to recognize the knowledge and insight of that large number
of private citizens who foresaw the eventual failure of their
plans. As we now know, they were able even to ignore the frequently
accurate forecasts of the government’s own intelligence
analysts.

The barriers of secrecy have allowed the national security
apparatus to evolve a rigid orthodoxy which excludes those
who question the accepted dogma. The result has been a failure
to re-examine the postulates underlying our policy, or to give
serious attention to alternatives which might avoid the kinds
of disastrous choices that have been made in the past decade.

Nothing in recent history has so served
to illuminate the damaging effects of secrecy as has the
release of the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department’s
history of American decisionmaking on Vietnam. This study
is a remarkable work, commissioned by the men who were responsible
for our Vietnam planning but who, by 1967, had come to see
that our policy was bankrupt. The study was thus a unique
attempt, by the Administration that had developed the policy,
to look at its foundations and to see what had gone wrong.

A special task force was assembled, composed
of outside experts and civilian and military analysts from
within the Defense Department. They were given access to
all the documentary evidence available to the Pentagon. The
result was the most complete study yet performed of the policymaking
process that led to our deepening involvement in Vietnam,
and the most revealing insight we have had into the functioning
of our government’s
national security apparatus.

We were told that we had to make sacrifices to preserve freedom
and liberty in Southeast Asia. We were told that South Vietnam
was the victim of aggression, and it was our duty to punish
aggression at its source. We were told that we had to fight
on the continent of Asia so that we would not have to battle
on the shores of America. One can accept these arguments only
if he has failed to read the Pentagon Papers.

However, the public has not had access
to this study. Newspapers in possession of the documents
have published excerpts from them and have prepared their
own summary of the study’s
findings. In doing this, they have performed a valuable public
service. But every American is entitled to examine the study
in full and to digest for himself the lessons it contains.
The people must know the full story of their government’s
actions over the past twenty years, to ensure that never again
will this great nation be led into waging a war through ignorance
and deception.

It is for this reason that I determined,
when I came into possession of this material, that it must
be made available to the American public. For the tragic
history it reveals must now be known. The terrible truth
is that the Papers do not support our public statements.
The Papers do not support our good intentions. The Papers
prove that, from the beginning, the war has been an American
war, serving only to perpetuate American military power in
Asia. Peace has never been on the American agenda for Southeast
Asia. Neither we nor the South Vietnamese have been masters
of our Southeast Asian policy; we have been its victims,
as the leaders of America sought to preserve their reputation
for tough­ness and determination.

No one who reads this study can fail to conclude that, had
the true facts been made known earlier, the war would long
ago have ended, and the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands
of Americans and Vietnamese would have been averted. This is
the great lesson of the Pentagon Papers. No greater argument
against unchecked secrecy in government can be found in the
annals of American history.

The Pentagon Papers tell of the purposeful withholding and
distortion of facts. There are no military secrets to be found
here, only an appalling litany of faulty premises and questionable
objectives, built one upon the other over the course of four
administrations, and perpetuated today by a fifth administration.

The Pentagon Papers show that we have created, in the last
quarter century, a new culture, a national security culture,
protected from the influences of American life by the shield
of secrecy. As New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan
has written, “To read the Pentagon Papers in their vast
detail is to step through the looking glass into a new and
different world. This world has a set of values, a dynamic,
a language, and a perspective quite distinct from the public
world of the ordinary citizen and of the other two branches
of the republic, Congress and the judiciary.”

The Pentagon Papers reveal the inner
workings of a government bureaucracy set up to defend this
country, but now out of control, managing an international
empire by garrisoning American troops around the world. It
created an artificial client state in South Vietnam, lamented
its unpopularity among its own people, eventually encouraged
the overthrow of that government, and then supported a series
of military dictators who served their own ends, and at times
our government’s ends, but never
the cause of their own people.

The Pentagon Papers show that our leaders
never understood the human commitments which underlay the
nationalist movement in Vietnam, or the degree to which the
Vietnamese were willing to sacrifice in what they considered
to be a century-long struggle to eliminate colonialism from
their land. Like the empires that have gone before us, our
government has viewed as legitimate only those regimes which
it had established, regardless of the views of those governed.
It has viewed the Viet Minh and their successors, the Viet
Cong, as insurgents rebelling against a legitimate government,
failing to see that their success demonstrated the people’s disaffection from the regime
we supported. Our leaders lived in an isolated, dehumanized
world of “surgical air strikes” and “Viet
Cong infrastructure,” when the reality was the maiming
of women and children and the rise of a popular movement.

The Papers show that there was no concern in the decisionmaking
process for the impact of our actions upon the Vietnamese people.
American objectives were always to preserve the power and prestige
of this country. In the light of the devastation we have brought
to that unhappy land, it is hard to believe that any consideration
was given to the costs of our policies that would be borne
by the very people we claimed to be helping.

But the American people too were treated
with contempt. The Pentagon Pa­pers show that the public
statements of optimism, used to sustain public support for
an increasingly unpopular policy, were contrary to the intelligence
estimates being given our leaders at the time. While we were
led to believe that just a few more soldiers or a few more
bombing runs would turn the tide, the estimates were quite
clear in warning that escalation would bring no significant
change in the war.

The Pentagon Papers show that the enemy
knew what we were not permitted to know. Our leaders sought
to keep their plans from the American people, even as they
telegraphed their intentions to the enemy, as part of a deliberate
strategy to cause him to back down. The elaborate secrecy
precautions, the carefully contrived subterfuges, the precisely
orchestrated press leaks, were intended not to deceive “the other side,” but
to keep the American public in the dark. Both we and the enemy
were viewed as “audiences” before whom various
postures of determination, conciliation, inflexibility, and
strength were portrayed. The American public, which once thought
of itself as a central participant in the democratic process,
found itself reduced to the status of an interested, but passive,
observer.

The people do not want, nor should they any longer be subjected
to, the paternalistic protection of an Executive which believes
that it alone has the right answers. For too long both the
people and Congress have been denied access to the needed data
with which they can judge national policy. For too long they
have been spoon-fed information designed to sustain predetermined
decisions and denied information which questioned those decisions.
For too long they have been forced to subsist on a diet of
half-truths or deliberate deceit, by executives who consider
the people and the Congress as adversaries.

But now there is a great awakening in
our land. There is a yearning for peace, and a realization
that we need never have gone to war. There is a yearning
for a more free and open society, and the emerging recognition
of repression of people’s
lives, of their right to know, and of their right to determine
their nation’s future. And there is a yearning for the
kind of mutual trust between those who govern and those who
are governed that has been so lacking in the past.

If ever there was a time for change, it is now. It is in this
spirit that I hope the past, as revealed in the Pentagon Papers,
will help us make a new beginning, toward that better America
which we all seek.

Mike Gravel

U.S. Senator

Washington, D.C.

August 1971

Preface to the Gravel Edition

The text of this book consists of public documents drawn from
the official record of the Senate Subcommittee on Public Buildings
and Grounds.

Early in June 1971, the New York Times, and then
other newspapers, began printing reports on, and excerpts from,
a lengthy Defense Department study of American decisionmaking
on Vietnam. Shortly thereafter, the Justice Department succeeded
in obtaining injunctions halting further publication of these
stories. On the evening of June 29, 1971, while there was still
doubt as to whether the newspapers would be permitted to continue
publishing their stories, United States Senator Mike Gravel
of Alaska attempted to read a collection of the Pentagon Papers
in his possession on the floor of the Senate. However, his
effort was frustrated by a parliamentary maneuver which prevented
him from gaining access to the Senate floor.

As Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee
on Public Buildings and Grounds, Senator Gravel immediately
convened a hearing, to receive testimony from Congressman
John Dow of New York on the war-related lack of funds to
meet our nation’s
needs for public buildings. As his opening remarks, and during
the course of the evening, Senator Gravel read part of the
Pentagon Papers into the record. The remaining portions of
the Papers were incorporated into the record of the subcommittee
and then were released to the press.

The material from the Pentagon Papers that was entered into
the record, and is reprinted here, consisted of about 2900
pages of narrative, 1000 pages of appended documents, and a
200-page collection of public statements by government officials
justifying U.S. involvement in Vietnam. According to information
reported in the press, the Defense Department study included
in total a narrative of about 3000 pages and documents amounting
to about 4000 pages.

The material presented here includes a full history of U.S.
decisionmaking on Vietnam from the early 1940s through March
of 1968. Even though the documents included with the narrative
were only a portion of those appended to the original study,
they were of sufficient interest and importance to warrant
inclusion in these volumes. (There are extensive quotations
within the narrative from many of the other documents included
with the original study.) In its published account of the study,
the New York Times included a number of documents
which did not appear in the subcommittee record. These have
been reprinted here also, in proper chronological sequence,
and their source is indicated. The collection of public statements
was drawn from the U.S. Department of State Bulletins and the
Public Papers of the Presidents, and was prepared in the form
shown here by the Defense Department task force which performed
the study.

The preparation of the subcommittee record was performed under
the direction of Senator Gravel. The chapter sequence was arranged
to provide a convenient, nearly chronological four-volume format.
The documents and public statements pertaining to each period
are appended to the material in each volume.

No material was added to or changed in the study or appended
documents and statements. In some cases, material was illegible
or missing. If this occurred within a direct quotation, the
omission was indicated with a bracketed statement. If it occurred
in narrative text, it was bridged by removing the entire sentence
in which it appeared, when it was evident that no substantive
material would be lost by this procedure; otherwise, the omission
was indicated by a bracketed statement. All other bracketed
insertions appear in the original study. Some maps were removed
when they were not of sufficient quality to be adequately reproduced
as unretouched facsimiles; these omissions have been indicated
in the text. Footnotes in the original study, referring primarily
to internal government reports, have been removed. A glossary
of specialized terms and acronyms was added.

These volumes provide the most complete text of this history
of American involvement in Vietnam yet made available, in a
form which should make it fully accessible to the American
people.

The contents of this volume are drawn from the official record
of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds.
No copyright is claimed in the text of this official Government
document. Published by Beacon
Press,
Boston. Beacon Press books are published under the auspices
of the Unitarian Universalist Association.

Sen. Gravel’s introduction is published in Archipelago with
permission of Sen. Gravel and Beacon Press, and with thanks
to the Miller Center of Public Affairs for
their assistance.